1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention described herein pertain to the field of computer systems. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, one or more embodiments of the invention enable a database interface generator configured to map complex constructs and semantics to a standardized interface that hides internal complexities while providing for efficient internal storage and speed.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are currently no known systems that generate an interface to a database that includes relationships such as taxonomy, families, qualifiers, relationships, non-field attributes, multi-valued fields or indirect lookups based on these constructs. Currently available systems provide lowest common denominator interfaces that build upon standard SQL data types and structures. Existing databases for example do not generally utilize or build upon non-standard structures such as taxonomy, families, qualifiers, relationships, non-field attributes, multi-valued fields or indirect lookups based on these structures. As such, most databases are inefficiently structured in a simple manner and hence exposing the schema is trivial since the mapping to XSD in this case is a direct translation process. The direct translation process iterates through the tables and fields and simply outputs the schema in XSD format.
In the case of more complex implementations that attempt to partition large data sets, most master data management systems require that product families (of which there may be thousands) be manually created by adding fields to the main data table for example. Families maintained in this direct manner using a field in the main table, must be manually moved to a different family if changes in the record result in the record no longer belonging to its original family. This direct method may require altering tens of thousands of records for a simple family change or family relationship change for example. As extending a main table to possess a family identifier is in keeping with the standard SQL layout for a table, the translation process remains trivial in that the schema is iterated through to provide a direct XSD schema output file that corresponds to the database schema. The remaining extended data types such as qualifiers are not utilized by known solutions and hence sparsely populated tables result.
For at least the limitations described above there is a need for a database interface generator that is configured to map complex constructs and semantics so that internal complexities are hidden while providing for efficient internal storage and speed.